California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris has announced a bill to combat blight was signed into law by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. Assembly Bill 2314 by Assemblymember Wilmer Carter, D-Rialto, provides additional tools to local governments and receivers to fight neighborhood blight caused by vacant homes.Click to continue

Less than three months before the presidential election, a new commentary from the Center for American Progress aims to elevate a critical issue that has yet to be discussed on the campaign trail—the issue of solving our nation’s housing crisis. The ongoing housing crisis has cost millions of American families their homes, has erased trillions of dollars in household wealth, and remains one of the biggest drags on our economic recovery. President Barack Obama has barely mentioned housing in recent months, aside from occasional pitches for reforms to help more homeowners refinance.Click to continue

Qualified entities interested in purchasing pools of severely distressed loans formerly insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) can now submit applications for the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, an expansion of an FHA disposition program that sells pools of defaulted mortgages headed for foreclosure and provides the opportunity for the purchaser and borrower to avoid a costly foreclosure.Click to continue

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has announced that the winning bidders in a real estate-owned (REO) pilot initiative have been chosen and transactions are expected to close early in the third quarter. Market response has been robust with strong qualified bidder interest.Click to continue

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris has announced the passage of two central elements of the California Homeowner Bill of Rights through a special two-House conference committee.Click to continue

Hope LoanPort (HLP), the national, neutral, non-profit Web-based system designed to bring efficiency, consistency and transparency to the processing of foreclosure alternatives, announces the launch of the state of Maryland Mediation Portal (Portal) which is the first statewide mediation portal in the country. Maryland and GMAC Mortgage collaborated with HLP with the objective of increasing the number of Maryland homeowners who opt-in by providing a Web-based method for homeowners to participate in meaningful foreclosure mediation.Click to continue

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris has announced that the California State Assembly and Senate have each passed important components of the California Homeowner Bill of Rights that will help protect homeowners from scams. The bills enhance the Attorney General's enforcement powers and allow the Attorney General to use special grand juries to prosecute multi-jurisdictional financial crimes. The Mortgage Fraud Strike Force established by AG Harris has been investigating and prosecuting a wide range of crimes related to mortgages, foreclosures and real estate.Click to continue

The real estate market’s foreclosure crisis continues to evolve and, as it does, so does the law governing wrongful foreclosure and related lender defenses. One theory that homeowners have used to set aside foreclosures in the past, was that an improper assignment or transfer of the mortgage or Deed of Trust by the lenders rendered it invalid. Historically, whenever a mortgage or Deed of Trust was transferred or assigned, the transaction was recorded in the Real Property Records.Click to continue

After more than six quarters of declining rates of serious mortgage delinquency in the metropolitan U.S., the rates of serious delinquency are climbing back from their June 2011 low according to the latest data from Foreclosure-Response.org. Serious delinquency, defined as the share of loans in foreclosure plus the share of loans delinquent 90 or more days, rose from 9.2 percent in June 2011 to 9.7 percent in December 2011 for the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, reaching the same rate as a year before.Click to continue

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has called on Congress to simplify the tax code as part of a comprehensive tax reform effort in order to help small businesses to continue serve as an engine of economic growth. Testifying on behalf of NAHB before the House Small Business Committee, Maryland home builder Marty Mitchell said that given the huge complexities in tax law, today's complicated federal tax system acts as a burden and hindrance on small businesses, which serve as the backbone of the economy.Click to continue